As summer finally arrives, I'm pushing my morning walks earlier to start the day with a few lungfuls of delightfully cold crisp air. When you pick a different part of the clock you see a different set of critters. This morning an unquestionable coyote trotted across the street in front of me. Presumably he's been around for a while, but doesn't show in full daylight.

Ukip is a "very intolerant" party and its appeal is not likely to last for a "long time" despite its success in the European elections, Sir John Major has said. The former Conservative Prime Minister said Nigel Farage has been "very smart" and proved "good at exploiting grievances". But he warned that the arguments for quitting Europe are "absolute nonsense" and said it would cost billions and leave this country in a "very isolated and very difficult" position.

The EU monetary system was set up in 1979. Since then, with some bumps and wiggles, EU has been clamping Britain ever more tightly in its iron jaws.
This chart (from here, with my annotation) shows how Britain has "benefitted" from joining the EU. You can see that Major's own plutocrats were steadily losing ground during the long "isolated and difficult" time before EU, and Major's own plutocrats are getting dramatically richer during the wonderful heavenly EU time.
Too bad about all those starving proles. They'll just have to eatcake so Major and his buddies can grow even more non-isolated and non-difficult.

A couple of interesting numbers.
1. Article in UK Telegraph tries to take a fresh look at North Korea. Probably fails, but one number grabbed my attention. "North Korea had just 25,554 kilometres of road in 2006, of which only 724km was paved." That's 450 miles in real measurements.
How does that compare with Spokane? This old newspaper article says we have
865 miles of paved streets. Just about twice NoKo's total.
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2. The real pattern of temperature vs CO2 is the same now as it was all the other times. Temp is the leading variable this time, just as before. Temp went up for 200 years, and now it's flattening. CO2 is continuing to go up.
When Curve A changes and Curve B doesn't change, you have two choices. Either A and B are unrelated or B is following A with some delay. Can't tell for sure until you see a longer record. If B never makes the same inflection, the two are probably unrelated. If B consistently makes the same turns after A, you know A is the leader. In this century we haven't seen B turn yet, BUT we do have a record of many millenia before the current century. During the previous history, temperature was always the leading variable. Given the history, it's unlikely that the current flattening of A reflects a sudden decoupling of the curves; it's more likely a continuation of the previous pattern with temperature as leader.
Other facts seem to show that the change in temperature is coming from inside the earth. Some areas of the seafloor are warming up more than others, leading to alterations in ocean current patterns. When the ocean warms, it outgasses.
Taking it one more step, the especially warm seafloor areas seem to match up with areas of maximum change in the earth's magnetic field.
Hypothesis: The mantle and magnetosphere are going through one of their occasional reversals, which is leading to unusual upflows and downflows of magma, causing unusual temperature gradients in the ocean. Those temperature gradients are altering the Gulf Stream, El Nino patterns, etc.
This is most likely part of a long natural cycle, but there's one dramatic manmade change that could directly affect the magnetosphere, and it's happening at just the right time.
Since 1980, which is exactly when the field started to move faster, we've been increasing the density of our electromagnetic transmissions in a hugely exponential way.
To get an order-of-magnitude picture, think of Spokane again.
We have 200K people. From 1920 to 1980 the number of point sources of radio waves was constant. We've always had about 20 radio and TV broadcasters. For a while TV stations were supplanting radio, and more recently the trend is opposite; but the total remains around 20.
That's one big point source per 10K people.
What else did we have from 1920 to 1980? Trying to estimate transmitters operating at any one moment, we had one police/fire transmitter, one taxi dispatcher, one commercial dispatcher (plumber, delivery) and one ham radio operator per 10K people.
Total of broadcasters, dispatchers and hams, about 5 point sources per 10K. That was all. No other transmitters. Frequencies were all below 300 MC, in a range where energy largely passes through and around objects without stirring up their atoms.
What do we have now? We still have those 5 old-fashioned sources per 10K people, but we ALSO have one cell phone PER PERSON, and 1 "internet of things" transmitter PER PERSON. I'm probably underestimating the latter because I've stubbornly resisted digitalizing my household; thus I don't have a proper basis for judging that figure.
Now we have an EXTRA 20K transmitters per 10K people, which makes the original 5 meaningless.
In short, we've gone from 5 sources per 10K to 20K sources per 10K.
We've multiplied the sources by 4000 over the same 30 years when these other phenomena related to the magnetosphere have gone wild. The new sources are less powerful than the old ones, but they cover the surface completely, and they are all in a frequency band that penetrates and energizes atoms of materials much more effectively than the older sources. Higher frequency = higher transfer of energy to materials.

It's fun to watch Godzilla Kerry roaring fiery overmodulated imprecations at "our" enemies of the moment. If we assume that "our" enemies are actually enemies, Godzilla Kerry is the best friend they ever had. Every single bad deed he accuses "our" enemies of committing is a deed that Kerry himself committed at some point in the past.
Today Old Zil is roaring at Snowden, with the usual rot about giving "our" enemies data that "our" enemies didn't have before.
Of course this is perfect nonsense. Anyone who has been watching NSA for the last several decades knows that NSA monitors everything.
I haven't been surprised by anything Snowden said. I'm an outsider who happened to be in a position to see the 'penumbra' of NSA a couple of times, but otherwise paid little attention to the subject. We can assume serious opponents have been paying vastly more attention, and have been interacting in a vastly more intense way than I have.
Well, what's the broader answer? Do criminals and terrorists behave differently after Snowden? Do they suppress their communication now that they realize that someone else might be listening?
Constants and variables. We have two separate situations.
High-level gangsters and high-level national opponents have been running their own spy activities. China has been penetrating all of our institutions for 30 years, and Sheikh Osama was working for CIA until his usefulness (and thus his life) expired. If those are "our" main enemies, it's dead certain that they knew far more specific details than Snowden has thus far revealed. Their operations won't change because they already knew everything important.
For low-level criminals the answer is the same for an entirely different reason. Basic professional criminals are short-term thinkers with no empathy, no ability to think from another angle. They didn't understand the phone system before Snowden and they still don't understand the phone system.
In today's local news:

Detectives searched a home in July 2013 after a tip came that the people who lived there were the last to see Broadwater alive. They left with no evidence of a murder but a new tip may be the break they need.
A tipster came forward saying he received a text which said "the body is buried what do I do next." The recipient had no tie to the case and did not recognize the number.

Dumb criminal. Blindly following orders, not even foreseeing that a text message might go to the wrong number, let alone to NSA's monitors!

The Irwindale City Council voted Wednesday night to drop a public nuisance declaration and lawsuit against Huy Fong Foods, makers of Sriracha (suhr-AH'-chuh) hot sauce. The dual moves brought an effective end to the spicy-air dispute that had Sriracha devotees worried about future sauce shortages and had suitors including the state of Texas offering Huy Fong a friendlier home.

An important victory for REAL BUSINESS and an important defeat for the "Multiple Chemical Sensitivity" idiots who insist on having a tasteless world. A dead world.
Smells may be annoying but most real business produces some kind of smell or annoyance. Banking is the least smelly and the most murderous of all industries.
Even among types of physical pollution, the most harmful is usually the least smelly.
I spent part of my childhood in Ponca, where crude oil was the Smell of Money. Continental and Cities Service refineries were south of town, and the wind nearly always carried their burnoff into the city. Nobody was harmed by the organic chemicals in the air, which were pretty much the same chemicals in hot sauce. In nearby Blackwell, a lead smelter produced no obvious smell, but it killed plants and animals and people. Wherever the wind carried the lead, you could see a gray barren zone. Moonscape. Nothing grew there.
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Sidenote: The strangest thing about this Sriracha story is that no reporter has actually bothered to SMELL THE SMELL. I've heard and read dozens of stories, and none of them included an ACTUAL FUCKING OBSERVATION.
Real journalism performs exactly one service. It places reporters in situations where ordinary people can't go because of expense or risk. The reporters OBSERVE what's happening in those places and REPORT on what they OBSERVE. This no longer occurs. Instead, journalism merely reads the same sources that any ordinary person can read, and filters them to create evil.

One of those little conjunctions.... I was reading the ravings of techie fanboys about Google's new totally self-driving car. And I was listening to BBC's brief coverage of the 'Inclusive capitalism' conference. In the latter, someone was talking about "market fundamentalism" as an enemy of real capitalism.
"Market fundamentalism" is the notion that The Market is a spontaneous self-driving machine which will create All Good Things if we just remove human decisions and Let The Markets Clear. The ultimate Good Thing, of course, is high-speed trading, where computers constantly buy and sell securities based on algorithms detecting tiny changes in price.
Google's car is a spontaneous self-driving machine which will create All Good Things if we just take all human decisions out of the process.
Both of these tyrannical delusions are commonly held by people who consider themselves to be Libertarians, which is exactly how these tyrannies have been inserted into daily life. If these robotic forms of commerce and transportation had been introduced by people wearing jackboots and helmets, the insertion would have taken a few minutes longer.
Automatic systems force out human systems, destroying the poor and powerless.
This is obvious with the market. When banks can bring in infinite profit by sucking on Yellen's wrinkly counterfeit-money tits, they don't need to pay interest to savers and they don't need to make (carefully judged) loans to small businesses. Capitalism no longer offers any benefits to working people.
Not quite so obvious with Googlecar. As a non-car-owning pedestrian, I can see it clearly. Every day I cross a half-dozen major streets, always involving a human negotiation. I try to predict what drivers will do, and drivers try to predict what I'll do. Often a driver will see me on the sidewalk, will realize that the density of traffic keeps me from crossing, and will nicely stop and motion me across.
Would Googlecar do this? Would it even stop when a kid unthinkingly walks into the street? No.
Theories don't have empathy, and theory-loving people don't have empathy.
When all cars are Googlecar, pedestrians and cats and dogs will die like flies.
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Afterthought for clarity: I'm not quite making an old-fashioned Luddite argument. The word Automatic is the key. Mechanical tools, used within appropriate limits, make life better and more profitable for working people. Cars made it easier to reach your job. Adding machines and computers made it easier for human bankers to serve ordinary people, requiring less labor and time for arithmetic. The current problem comes from machines and theories making decisions. It comes from humans surrendering the last and most important aspect of humanity to their machines and theories.

I'm sort of jaded by online 'devices', especially since I've been coding some of them. The subject has become interlaced with work.
Nevertheless, here's a fun software 'gadget' that broke through my jade.
Korea's main search engine Nate.com has this timeline thingamajig for selecting the desired search range. You just pull the start and end arrows, then hit the search button. The timeline shows which months are likely to yield more results.
Here's a sample in a dumb search for 'dachshund' videos.
(Incidentally, the word for Search on the Search button shows why Oriental joke names work so well. In mechanical transliteration it's Kumsak. In running speech I think it would be pronounced more like Gawmseng, which isn't funny.)

One strong common factor among the recent school massacrists: All come from upper-class or professional families. This isn't new. Several episodes of old cop shows like Dragnet and Highway Patrol deal with similar massacrists, and they're always from upper-class homes.
The class connection is obvious. Rich families can pay teams of top shrinks, and can afford low-security private asylums. Indulgence is more important than real cure.
Maybe there's something else going on. How do modern rich fuckheads select mates? They're looking for high IQ and low empathy, plus infinite greed and zero resilience. Those are the qualities needed for success in NY or DC or LA or London. And what happens after several generations of inbreeding, always trending toward higher IQ and lower empathy and more-than-infinite greed and less-than-zero resilience? You asked for it, you got it.

But a one huge potential flaw in all this research: kids who skew the results by making stuff up for a giggle. "Mischievous Responders," they're called. Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian, the author of the new paper, is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He says he first noticed this phenomenon, and coined the term "mischievous responder," in a 2011 paper with Dorothy L. Espelage.

Needless to say, the surveyers were only interested in "LGBTQQ2A35JYOWJTONOJWNOTJKL individuals." This is the only topic. Not the only interesting topic or the only important topic, the only topic. Nothing else exists.
Aside from that, what's with "first noticed the phenomenon" that teenagers are unreliable?
World Metrology Day was last week, so this is an appropriate time for a reminder. Understand what you're measuring. Know your baseline, which in this case includes ALL the natural characteristics of adolescents. Rebellion, contrariness, unpredictability. Those aren't "mischief" or "confounders", those are an integral part of the object you're measuring.
Builders of surveys and tests used to understand baselines. The old MMPI, for instance, included all sorts of questions designed to tease out the important variables when the responder was faking. The degree of faking was itself one of the scores that popped out when you graded an MMPI.
Modern social "scientists" have obviously missed those old lessons along with every single aspect of science and logic. Total wild-eyed stupidity and insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity beyond insanity are the cardinal virtues for a "scientist" now.

The EU parliament election could be a rare exception to the rule that elections with candidates are meaningless. Ukip and National Front are NON-INTERCHANGEABLE politicians, and they have beaten all the interchangeable satans decisively and firmly in England and France. In other EU countries the NON-INTERCHANGEABLES have gained ground but haven't totally defeated the satans.
These new sane politicians are opposed to all three of EU's satanic policies: Die-Versity, Free Trade, and "Global Warming" pseudoscience. Thus they pose a severe and serious danger to the satanic elite because they represent ACTUAL PEOPLE who live in ACTUAL COUNTRIES.
It will be interesting to watch how the EU demonizes and destroys these NON-INTERCHANGEABLE sane humans.

I'm sure this is old stuff to biologists, but it struck me for the first time while reading this marvelous and precise logical exposition on the exact starting point of human life.
There's really no difference between oviparous and viviparous.
All multicellular animals, and nearly all multicellular plants, are viviparous. All of them contain the initial zygote in some form of protective housing during its initial development. A plant's seed is not a zygote. It's a living free-floating womb, containing a mostly-formed new plant and providing sufficient nutrition and protection for the new plant to reach the point where it can live on its own. Same for a fish egg or a bird egg. The only difference is that some wombs are decoupled from the mother, while others remain inside the mother.
Which style of womb has the advantage? We're accustomed to thinking of our type as superior, but Nature doesn't know that. Our tightly-coupled womb depends on the limited lifespan and limited traveling ability of the mother. The plant seed doesn't have those limits. Under the right conditions a plant womb can contain its new life for thousands of years or carry it thousands of miles, into times and places that the mother couldn't possibly imagine.

The response of Satan's governments and Satan's media to recent elections in places like Syria and Ukraine is consistent. I've been trying to fit it into a larger pattern. Finally located the larger pattern.
Here's the pattern that holds true both WITHIN Satan's homelands and in distant places like Syria and Ukraine:
Elections that count are considered illegitimate. If Satan has the power to overturn such elections, he will. If such elections are in distant places, he will try hard to delegitimize them, but may not be able to eliminate them entirely.
Elections that have zero consequence are legitimate, and will be allowed to stand because they don't matter.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Sure enough, it's another variant on Manweller's Rule. Manweller was originally discussing our idiotic efforts to create "democracy" in countries that hadn't even reached a basic single government. In such countries, elections may occur but they won't count. Competing factions will continue to fight with AK-47s and bombs until one faction wins power.
Manweller's original rule is: Elections only count when they don't really matter.
The current variant is pretty much the converse, with teeth: Elections that count will be overturned and delegitimized.
And how do we know which elections count? That's easy.
Elections that decide between candidates are meaningless. Candidates who make it to the point of electability are identical in their behavior. Candidates are interchangeable.
REFERENDA are meaningful because they change behavior and conditions. Referenda may create new laws, or revise laws, or delete laws, or declare independence, or alter the behavior of politicians.
Look at Syria and Ukraine, or look at any state in US. Referenda that change borders or change conditions for marriage or change laws on capital punishment are instantly overturned by black-robed Satans, or declared invalid by remote control. Elections that replace one identical candidate with another are just fine.
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Sidenote: An even more extreme example in yesterday's news. Michigan was accustomed to a congressional election that offered even less choice than two identical candidates. The accustomed and approved election, for 50 years, featured a wide variety of John Conyers. You could vote for John Conyers or John Conyers or John Conyers or John Conyers, depending on your taste and ideology. If you didn't like the way John Conyers was serving the district, you could kick him out and replace him with John Conyers. But! .... because John Conyers is senile, he forgot to file for election this time. THREAT WARNING! DEFCON RED! POSSIBILITY OF ELECTION BETWEEN TWO IDENTICAL CANDIDATES! DOES NOT COMPUTE! DOES NOT COMPUTE! MUST HAVE ONLY ONE IDENTICAL CANDIDATE! TWO IDENTICAL CANDIDATES ARE LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE! So Satan rectified the situation, arbitrarily reversing the election laws to insure that the ONLY POSSIBLE ELECTION would continue unabated.

The last few days have seemed sort of full-moonish, even though the moon itself is at the other end of its cycle. Noticing what might be called 'failures of wisdom' in myself and in other humans and mammals. Lots of uninhibited and unwise moves.
On my Thursday store walk I noticed a gray cat slinking across a street, playing the old cat game Come And Get Me! You'll Be Surprised When I Suddenly Disappear!
I thought: "Damn, cat. Don't play that game. It works on cats and dogs, but it doesn't work on cars."
On my Saturday store walk the prediction unfortunately came true. The same cat in roughly the same place, flattened in a pool of blood. A couple of kids were examining the cat. The younger kid probably didn't understand why the cat wasn't moving. The older kid pulled her away, and both went home.
Jesus. What an awful way to get acquainted with the facts of life and death. You have to learn these things sooner or later, but it's better to learn them first with something less 'personal', such as a mouse in a trap.

Professor Polistra brings a very small bucket of linguistic poop. She's not happy about this, but new arrivals are so sparse and unpredictable that it's probably a good time to empty this one before it gets obsolete.
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Sorta speak:
From an NPR interview with a wise old Detroit dude: "Yeah, I was selling and using. I was my own best customer, sorta speak."
Makes sense as a migration of regularity. So to has no life outside this one phrase, but sorta [verb] is a common combination.
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Thermal power plants (retronym)
In a pro-genocide editorial by Bloomberg: "A large percentage of water usage currently goes to THERMAL power plants." The word THERMAL was spoken in the same vile contemptuous tone a newscaster would normally reserve for Christians or heterosexuals.
Reliable power plants are always THERMAL. Coal, nat gas, nuclear. Nothing else really counts as a power plant. By retronyming THERMAL, the genocidists are stating officially that unreliable power sources are the default now.
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Toothcomb:
On BBC. "An American auditing company has been going through the accounts of the Vatican Bank with a toothcomb."
Clearly the announcer thinks of a toothcomb as being something like a toothbrush. Both would seem equally exotic to a Brit, so this is understandable.
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Oprah's Chai Tea:
Seen in grocery store.
Nothing like a cup of hot Chai Tea after a Cow Beefsteak, or a Pig Porkchop, or an Omelette à l'oeuf, or (my own preferred favorite preference) Frijole beans and Arroz rice!
I suppose these duplicative phrases might be plausible retronyms. If you lived in a hippie area where just plain tea had come to mean an infusion of rose hips, you might want to specify an infusion of
Camellia Sinensis as chai tea.

An unoriginal piece by a Commie pretending to be a "former fundamentalist" nevertheless makes a good point. Or rather one of the commenters on the piece makes a good point. Pledging your allegiance to a flag is idolatry, and pledging your allegiance to the idea of a republic is silly. Serious Christians and serious Muslims are strictly opposed to idolatry for good reasons.
Most of the commenters are typical and boring Commies, objecting mainly to "under God".
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The 1954 insertion of "under God" was even more idolatrous and silly than the pledge itself. It implies that the flag and the idea of the republic and God are all woven together and should be worshipped together. Of course the republic itself ceased to exist in 1803 when the Supreme Satans declared themselves to be absolute emperors, so the idea of the republic is a completely empty concept.
It was silly from another angle, which I hadn't thought about till now. Supposedly "under God" was meant to reinforce our "battle" against "godless Communism" as embodied in the USSR.
(1) It's no longer clear that we were actually battling against anything. Another event of 1954, Comrade Roy Cohn's coup d'etat, placed Soviet agents firmly in charge of the military and the media, where they remain firmly in charge. And our pointless wars in Korea and Vietnam were actually helping to weaken and distract China, giving an advantage to Russia.
(2) Russians, then and now, were and are more firmly religious than Americans. While Soviet export propaganda was stirring up violent anti-religion among our progressive enlightened elites, internal actions were much more tolerant. Long after our progressive elites had banned all mention of religion in schools, Polish classrooms had a cross on the wall. Measured comparatively, we're the "godless" side.
(3) "Under God" gave our progressive elites a fine weapon to use against "neanderthal fundies". By suing schools down to bedrock, our progressives were able to destroy religion and civilization more effectively and quickly than they could have otherwise.
(4) Loyalty oaths for teachers and other officials were introduced at the same time, and were equally silly and counterproductive. Oaths served no purpose except to create disloyalty. Real Soviet agents had no problem with saying "I have never been a Communist." Lying was part of their arsenal. Thoughtful people had a big problem with stating an ideology to get a job. It seemed like tyranny, and it was.

For several decades scientists have been trying to come up with an explanation for the formation of the enigmatic, vegetation-free circles frequently found in certain African grassland regions. Now researchers have tested different prevailing hypotheses as to their respective plausibility.

Tested hypotheses? Good! That's science! What are the hypotheses?

The most popular ... these mysterious patches are the work of termites. The insects allegedly nibble away at the grassroots...
Other researchers consider hydrocarbons emanating from the depths of the earth being responsible for this phenomenon. Like in a chimney, these gases are presumed to be rising to the surface resulting in the localised loss and disappearance of vegetation.
A third fraction of scientists believes self-regulating grass growth...

Okay. So these researchers must have LOOKED at the grass-free patches. Must have checked for termites, measured gas emissions, and tested the grass under different conditions of moisture and competition. Right?
Wrong. They didn't look at anything, didn't test anything. They just sat at their computers and ran simulations.

“We have adopted an entirely novel approach in this research”, reports this member of the UFZ institute, who by now has been studying fairy circles for more than 15 years. This study is based on the review and evaluation of aerial images, covering representative regions with fairy circle occurrences throughout northwest Namibia. With the aid of these images scientists have analysed for the first time the exact spatial location and distribution of these barren patches within the surrounding landscape...

Idiots. Let's replay the most precise definition of science, by GW Carver who was working in the exact same field of plant growth.
"Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you. You learn to talk to them."
Carver did NOT say "Sit on your Kraut ass. Create a luminous intellectual fog. Make up numbers and equations."

Bleah. Someone nearby is spraying some kind of pesticide or herbicide. Can hear the compressor-sprayer rig several houses away. The vapor is making me semi-ill and semi-headachy. Never smelled this before. It's nothing like the old DDT smell. Slightly resembles the ethylene aroma of a bad tomato, plus a dash of camphor as in mothballs or dry-cleaning. Clings to my nose and lungs and tongue, but it's NOT one of my favorite things.
I hope they're not going to make a habit of this. I'm trying to get some work done, and this is slowing me down.
Is this Roundup? Can't find any clear descriptions of the smell online, except the word "distinctive". That's true for damn sure, but unhelpful. (Does Roundup produce Short Sentence Syndrome?)
Later: After having this stuff in my nose and pharynx for a few hours, a recognizable insecticide smell finally emerges as the 'base note'. Not DDT; more like the insecticide in household sprays like Raid.
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And a month later, after noticing exactly when and where the smell is strongest: It's not Roundup at all. It's the neighbor's diesel truck. He must be using some kind of biodiesel or "ethanol-diesel" fuel if such a thing exists.

"The problem of antimicrobial resistance is very analogous to global warming. You've got to do things in the UK, and have a UK policy, but at the same time, you've got to have an international policy," said Michael Moore, the antimicrobial resistance champion for the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, and Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, urge world leaders to set up an international panel on antimicrobial resistance to keep existing drugs working and develop alternatives. Based on the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change, they say it should be charged with finding ways to slash the use of antibiotics to prevent the spread of resistance, and work with industry to develop drugs and treatments to fight infections caused by bacteria, but also viruses and parasites.

Sane people who understand reality will read this comparison and think: "Global warming is a murderous fraud and crime, based on total reversal of facts and total misuse of science and logic. If antibiotic resistance is the same type of threat as global warming, it's a total scam, not a problem at all."
Raving-bonkers genocidal mass-murdering Gaian psychotics will read this comparison and think: "The UN's IPCC has accomplished nothing! We need to eliminate MORE THAN ALL humans from The Planet[pbuh]! The UN has only managed to kill a few million! If this minimal baby-step level of response to The Gross Sins And Iniquities Of Evil Humans is considered to be an appropriate example, then antibiotic resistance must not be a serious problem."
Unfortunately, antibiotic resistance IS a real problem. Overuse of antibiotics is unquestionably leading to a complete failure of antibiotics. And it MAY be leading to the current excess of diabetes and similar auto-immune problems, through disruption of colon bacteria.
Farrar and Woolhouse have ruined their own important message by comparing it to a monstrous scam.

I have a bit more sympathy for Chuckie the Microwit after seeing his behavior in a disaster last year.
As a man he's admirable. His instincts and training show exactly why a noble class is worth maintaining. He provides an honest example of courage and humility for the masses to observe.
As a ruler he's useless. He's not smart enough to say or do the right thing in a complex geopolitical situation.
His comparison of Putin to Hitler fails in every direction. WW2 comparisons just don't apply here.
Here's a closer (but still poor) comparison: Putin in 2014 is like JFK in 1962.
In 1962: Cuba had been an American colony in fact if not in theory for a long time. When Castro broke loose with Soviet help, Eisenhower was unhappy but passive. JFK was more active, and when Russia pushed the issue by bringing in missiles, he stood up for our former colony.
In 2014: Ukraine has been part of Russia, sometimes in fact and sometimes in law, for a long time. When Ukraine broke loose with American help, Yeltsin was unhappy but passive. Putin is more active, and when America pushed the issue by forcing a coup against the pro-Russian leader, Putin stood up for his people.
This fight was NOT started by Russia. This fight was started by neocon Victoria Nudelman alias Nuland, acting for reasons that are still unclear. (We can generally hypothesize that a neocon is acting for tribal reasons to enrich US/UK banksters, but I don't see the connection with Ukraine yet.)
In the broadest sense, all of today's chaos is Nature's attempt to repair the damage done by Britain and US in 1920. Versailles divided the world into completely unnatural nation-states, splitting ethnic groups across borders in Europe and the Middle East. WW2 was caused by those divisions, but ended with the same divisions even more firmly in place.
From this view, what's happening in Ukraine? Mother Russia is herding all her puppies back into the nest, with special attention to the puppies that have been lured toward EU by poisoned treats.

Courseware update.... Along with doing the real work of coding and graphics, I've been hassling for the last week with a classic Murphy's Law situation.
For the next phase of the work, publisher needs to have me tied into their QA system so I can submit the individual lessons and fix individual details. For "security" reasons their QA system isn't run as a direct-access website. Instead, they run it through Cisco-built software called VPN, which installs a separate SSL channel on your computer. We know how secure SSL is, don't we?
The CORRECT instructions should have been as follows: (1) Download and install the Cisco VPN software. (2) Run the VPN thing and connect it to our main server. (3) While VPN is running, use any browser to connect with our QA system.
The instructions they gave me were written for a situation where the remote employee already has the VPN installed. Because I know what's on my computer, I immediately realized the instructions were useless, so I began asking for appropriate instructions. The non-tech people at the other end were accustomed to operating with everything already installed by their IT guys, so they didn't understand the problem.
After that, we spent a week of email and phone tag, with misunderstandings of the procedure on both ends and wrong URLs given at each stage.
When I finally had the VPN thing working, I ass-u-me-d that the actual QA needed to be reached through the VPN thing, because the whole setup is a "private channel". But the VPN thing wouldn't select any new destinations after it was running. I told them this, but they didn't catch my bad assumption. Properly, at that stage the VPN doesn't need to select anything else. It's already doing its single job of diverting the browser's connection into an allegedly "more secure" SSL connection.
They were so thoroughly accustomed to the proper way of doing things that they couldn't see what was wrong. I hadn't bothered with the REST of the original instructions after seeing that the FIRST step was inappropriate. (Why would the REST of it be any better than the first step?)
The situation was resolved in a strange non-verbal way. They had me install a remote-control thing .... again with a wrong URL, requiring correction after I couldn't download it. With the remote-control thing, their IT guy ran my computer, turned on the VPN thing, and used IE to reach the QA site. This was all fast and automatic for him; he was only verifying that the setup would actually work. When I saw him open IE, I understood my bad assumption.

The 'Spokane News' facebook page invited its readers to go out in today's nice weather and take a picture. The result is an outstanding cross-section of Real Spokane. At least so far, NOBODY has snapped the usual postcard stuff. No shots of the falls, the clock tower, or downtown. Just front yards, back yards, office interiors, kids and dogs. Several of the shots include examples of the Default Spokane House, which indelibly marks them as Real Spokane.

Several minutes ago a military-looking plane passed overhead, very close to sonic speed. Not quite a sharp boom, but an amazingly loud and long thunder. Could hear it for 10 minutes as it flew presumably toward Fairchild. Conveniently, a normal airliner flew in another direction for comparison. I'd say the fighter jet was 100 dB for the first few minutes, and the normal airliner was 40 dB.
Bit later: Well, no, it couldn't have been in the air 10 minutes if it was heading for Fairchild. Fairchild is 10 miles from here, so 10 minutes of flight to reach Fairchild would be 60 mph. Car speed, not sonic speed. Even if I overestimated the 10 minutes... if I was only hearing it for 3 minutes ... any sort of jet aircraft would go well beyond Fairchild in 3 minutes.

When I moved here in '91, the bus lines still broadly followed original streetcar lines, with the same numbers and names for original routes. STA finally got rid of the old scheme in 2006. Before the change, the bus that came to this neighborhood was called #1 Hollywood. The same route also passed through West Central.
I thus ass-u-me-d that Hollywood referred to the area near Natatorium Park, which contained short streets named Hollis and Sherwood. Seemed logical. Those streets started exactly at the original western terminus of the streetcar line.
Nope. All wrong. A chance reference in a newspaper column today led me to search more thoroughly. The search isn't easy because "Spokane Hollywood" leads to nothing but Bing Crosby. Nevertheless, hidden in the PDF weeds were a couple of appropriate historical refs.
Turns out Hollywood was right here, centered on this block. The northern terminus of the streetcar line was here, and streetcar line #1 was named after this area. You'd never know it from any visible or official signs or maps. "Hollywood" appeared only on the buses, and disappeared in 2006. Nothing around here (with the possible exception of Alameda St?) has a Hollywood-related name. The subdivision was Boulevard Park, not Hollywood.
Strange to think that I've lived in a place for 24 years without knowing the proper name of the place!
= = = = =
Later again, after finding a more precise old map: The streetcar line used the name for this spot, but the Hollywood Addition was just south of the Boulevard Park Addition. The Hollywood Addition was, and still is, a 4 block x 4 block rectangle, from Wellesley south to Longfellow and from 'E' Street west to Rustle. So finally we have the official source of the name! (Incidentally, Rustle appears as Rustic on some of those old maps. I don't know which one was the typo.)

As I've grown old and fat and stiff, cutting toenails has become more difficult. When I was young and supple (and my nails were also more supple!) I could pop into a lotus position and snip neatly with scissors or clippers. Now I try various tricks with diagonal cutters and files, but nothing works properly. The wire-cutter either cuts nothing; cuts down behind the skin, guaranteeing ingrow; or cuts the skin. Flat files are hard to use on just one toe.
Finally found the solution. This little super-cheap Chinese crap tool. About ten dollars on Ebay.
It's sort of like a junior version of a Dremel tool, but much weaker and slower. The weak motor is the key to its success, oddly enough. Just run the sander back and forth along the edge of each nail with a light touch, and it takes the nails down to a proper length and smoothness. Time 5 to 10 seconds per toe. No chance of damaging the skin; the small sander always stays on the target toe; and the weak motor stops when you dig a bit too deep. Foolproof and cootproof.
The only negative is that the process sounds and smells a lot like dentistry... but that's minor compared to the benefit.
Soft motors can be an elegant solution. The old vacuum-powered windshield wipers had a similar self-limiting quality. In a light rain the wipers would wipe when there was enough rain to slide on, and would stop when (or where) the glass was dry. You couldn't burn out the motor or blow a fuse by turning the knob when the wipers were frozen. No software or interrupting timer needed; just mechanical self-regulation. [Not the manifold-vacuum wipers. Those were purely useless. I'm talking about wipers powered by a diaphragm piggybacked on the fuel pump.]

BBC's Why Factor has a fascinating segment on Symmetry. They missed a couple of points that would have made it even more fascinating.
(1) They mentioned Gershwin's symmetrical up/down pattern in I've Got Rhythm, but skipped the fact that Gershwin gave explicit instructions to performers. Those four notes were supposed to be exactly equal in length and stress to bring out the symmetry. This spondaic equality is hard because English is strongly trochaic. Very few performers follow the instructions, and the recording BBC used was typical of this failure.
(2) After discussing the Gershwin thing, which was definitely a case of symmetry, BBC slid over into discussing periodicity in music or literature, while continuing to call it symmetry. Not the same thing! Symmetry involves starting from a center point or center line, and running out to the end in various directions, exactly once. Periodicity means repeating the same pattern in the same direction, spatially or temporally. Stanzas in a poem, steps in a dance, columns or dormers on a building, movements in a symphony. Some of those repetitions may be symmetrical, like the Gershwin example, but that's rather rare.
(3) Some explorer type noted that we are sensitive to symmetry because animals (i.e. likely threats) are symmetrical. True, but only part of the reality. Full reality is more interesting. Every natural object in the world, living and non-living, is asymmetrical on Y. Up and down are always different. Plants are radially symmetrical in the X and Z planes because they stand still. They need to be equally aware of events on all sides and equally available on all sides. They can't run away from a caterpillar or walk toward a sunny area; they have to fight the caterpillar with chemicals or turn flowers toward the sunny side. Sessile animals are also radially symmetrical on XZ for the same reason, but we don't encounter sessile animals on land. They're on the floor of lakes and oceans. Mobile land animals are bilaterally symmetrical on X (side-side), and strongly asymmetrical on Z (front-back). We move forward along Z, eating in front and leaving poop behind. So we need to scan a wide range on X to know what's ahead of us. We need to be equally capable of turning in either direction, so our limbs are also symmetrical on X but not on Z.
This helps to explain why mirrors are hard to deal with. A mirror doesn't have any preference for Y or X. It simply reflects each point straight back. Because nothing in the natural world has Y-axis symmetry, our sensory system doesn't care or know about Y-axis symmetry. So we don't see anything unusual about the mirror's straight-back action on Y. But our senses are deeply interested in X-symmetry, because that's the direction that tells us whether an object is a threat. We empathize with a facing human. We can get inside his head and "feel" which is his weapon hand. The mirror's version of a facing human is wrong on X. His weapon hand is on the wrong side, which gets us all jangly when we try to think about it.

Commies like to talk about THE OTHER, which is a magic potion that turns all thinking by whites into
The Commie view of WW2 is purely defined by locating THE OTHER. For the Commie mind, we hated Japs solely because Japs are THE OTHER, and we rounded them up because they are THE OTHER, and we developed an atom bomb and used it without any provocation solely because Japs are THE OTHER.
I suppose they're right about one thing. Among the industrial countries that participated in big wars, Japs are certainly the most alien. They are an immiscible element, never assimilating in countries where they emigrate, and never allowing foreign immigrants in Japan. Their language is unrelated to Euro languages, and their religion and culture are completely impenetrable.
Unfortunately for the Commie delusion, none of this was reflected in our actual news and propaganda DURING the war. After Pearl Harbor we paid very little attention to the Japs.
Our Navy and Air Force and Marines were ferociously and desperately fighting the Japs for control of all those little Pacific islands. We were losing thousands of men to gain each square mile of useless coral atolls, partly because we were unwilling to use poison gas.
All of this was happening with very little notice. Something like 80% of our attention was on the Krauts.
Are Krauts THE OTHER? Precisely not. Krauts ʁ US. By genes and culture, 20th century Americans were more German than anything else. Away from the coasts, nearly everyone is part Kraut. These maps of languages other than English in US show the pattern nicely. Spanish is the most common now, but that's a post-WW2 development. Eliminating Spanish, the older German dominance is obvious. Even now, 110 years after most of the immigration, German is still spoken in households.
In fact we were fighting Japs (THE OTHER) solely because they attacked us, and we weren't especially interested in that side of the war. We were fighting Krauts (OURSELVES) because they were attacking our old enemy England, and our hatred was riveted on that side of the war.

The lastfewentries about laborers, sweat of brow, etc, were spun off by a tiny stupid internal struggle I'm having with professional pride. Or something like that. It doesn't remotely compare with the true soul-struggle of a business owner forced to violate his religion, but it's still a struggle.
Now that I've got the functionality of new courseware working reasonably well, publisher wants me to use the super-fashionable 'twitter bootstrap' stuff for styling. The whole JS/CSS/SVG setup is already annoying, as I've noted before. You can't build a self-contained product that's guaranteed to work on every proper system.
Tacking on an external library makes things even worse. Especially when the library is open-source with dubious rights that could be yanked at any time. I've seen several previously good programs ruined by breaking the self-contained EXE rule and hanging out with external libraries.
I keep trying to convince myself: It's NOT MY PROBLEM. It's THEIR PROBLEM. They're paying me (at least in theory) so I'm simply a bot serving their purposes.
Maybe it's time to rerun Chuck's Law, for my own benefit:
Back when I was teaching electronics, I endured a fellow teacher named Chuck, who had been an Army Tech Sergeant. Chuck loved to pin me down and tell endless boring stories about his Army days. Each story was about some Lieutenant or other boss giving stupid orders, and the climax of each story was always the same: "So I sez Ho Kay, we'll do it your way." And Chuck led the other underlings in following the order precisely, with no allowance for real conditions. Everything fell apart. The Lieut finally understood and countermanded his stupidity when confronted with concrete consequences.
So I sez Ho Kay, we'll do it Twitter's way.
There. I feel better immediately after writing it! Now I just need to close my eyes and hold my nose and get this part of the work done as quickly as possible, so I can proceed to less annoying parts.
= = = = =
Three fucking hours later: Done. Wasn't so bad after all. Must admit the result looks better even if it's disgustingly fashionable.

Continuing to monitor the acceleration of Satan.
Reprint from February:
= = = = =START REPRINT:
The departure of Sovietism from Russia was clear and well-marked, but its arrival on this side of the strait was more gradual and implicit. One thing is definite: Bush The Father was the carrier. After trying to assassinate the last anti-Soviet president and narrowly missing, BTF proceeded as if his bullet had done its intended job. He did everything a proper Soviet leader would do: shot Christians, gave absolute power to the EPA Terrorist Army, expanded "human" "rights", expanded "free trade". Clinton and Bush The Son continued in the same direction, bombing large numbers of Christians and Muslims here and abroad, destroying physical infrastructure and cultural infrastructure here and abroad, expanding "free trade" and "human" "rights", and generally breaking and obliterating everything that was built by previous generations of normal people.
Through all those concrete (and concrete-smashing!) steps, we never had a verbal declaration that all religious beliefs are prohibited. Now we finally have it, not that it matters very much.

Gay couples and rights supporters have launched a series of legal challenges to bans in federal and state courts in recent months following two key decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Attorneys general should base their decision on whether to defend their states in such cases, not on politics, but on questions of guarantees under the U.S. Constitution, such as equal protection of the law, Holder added. "Engaging in that process and making that determination is something that's appropriate for an attorney general to do," Holder told the New York Times.

Satan always veils his words, but Holder's meaning is easy to translate:
Thou shalt not tolerate religion.
Meanwhile in other parts of the world (eg Africa and Russia), governments are strongly opposing Satan and supporting God.
The switchover is complete.
= = = = =END REPRINT.
Now in May we're starting to see a more explicit and active implementation of the Bush/Clinton/Romney/Obama pogrom.
The current step is to drive serious Christians and Muslims out of any occupation where their religion might possibly contaminate proper satanic citizens or interfere with Satan's work.
We're seeing this on a large (but blurry) scale with Romneycare. Employers are no longer allowed to decide where to spend their money. If they don't feel it's appropriate to pay for baby-killing, they can always go out of business. This is not a viable choice for large companies. Going out of business would lead to perpetual and infinite lawsuits from various stakeholders and employees and unions, most of whom were not involved in running the pogrom.
We're seeing it on a smaller and sharper scale with the question of homosexual "marriage".
In today's news:

COEUR D'ALENE:
The Hitching Post is one of the most well known chapels in the Inland Northwest. In its 95 years of operation thousands of people have been married in the small chapel. But the owners are willing to walk away if the ban on gay marriage is permanently lifted.
When the future of same-sex marriage in Idaho is finally sorted out in court, the owners of the Hitching Post said they are prepared to close their doors rather than conduct same-sex marriages.

The phrase about "finally sorted out" is silly. The matter is going to be settled in a week or so, and we know with 100.000000000000% certainty which way it will be settled. Satan's way. There is no other way in the Anglosphere.
Bravo to the owners for sticking to principle instead of taking the stupid "fighting from inside" line. That never works. All you can do is save your own soul.

In the Linotype era, narrow fonts with no serifs were often used for screaming headlines. Such fonts disappeared in the '70s. Now they're back in a different context, but for the same reason as before.
The Linotype (and Ludlow) had strict limits on font size because the letters had to be cast as part of a fixed-size slug.
Lead isn't strong enough to hold much of a cantilever. In practice you'd put blank slugs under the cantilevered part, but you'd still be asking for trouble. So BIG HEADLINES were set with single letters, assembled by hand in a composing stick. Often these letters were made of wood because big blocks of lead had too much inertia to stay in a form when it was slapping back and forth.
Big individual letters were also used for theatrical posters or grocery store price posters, hence the common term 'Display fonts' or 'Poster fonts'. These fonts had to be simple with relatively constant line-width and no serifs, because lead couldn't tolerate a lot of strain at this large scale. Each part of the letter's structure had to be capable of taking tremendous pressure without breaking off.
Example: Look at the paper Polistra is holding. There are 8 big letters in the top part and maybe 5000 smaller letters in the lower half. Assuming the press exerts a ton of overall pressure, each big letter has to take 100 pounds, and each small letter takes about 3 ounces.
When commercial printing switched to photo offset processes in the '70s, Display fonts weren't needed. Bending strength and inertia were no longer relevant. Film and paper do have granular structures, but the grain is so tiny that it doesn't matter. For practical purposes offset printing is perfectly analog, perfectly continuous, perfectly scalable.
Display fonts have returned in the era of iphones. News sites and meme sites (i.e. suppliers of lies and suppliers of truth) strongly favor Display fonts.
Though every aspect of the technology has changed dramatically, Display fonts are needed again for the same underlying reason. Digital fonts are instantly scalable by the end user, which means any font must be readable in a wide variety of sizes and dots per inch.... but the granular structure of the pixels in the display imposes limits at the small end just as lead's granular structure imposes limits at the large end. If you want a word to remain readable when pixels threaten to break up the curves, the letters need to be simple with relatively constant line-width and no serifs.

Spring is continuing the step-function theme of this year. Cold mornings have held on with remarkable consistency. Morning walks still require a winter coat. But the step toward summer is coming.
Last night, for the first time, my usual blanket combination was too warm. I had to remove one layer ..... and I realized that one layer makes a HUGE difference in coziness. It's almost meaningless in terms of simple weight; the extra layer weighs maybe 1 pound over my surface, so it's a difference of .002 PSI on my skin. Can't possibly be important. But it is.
Templates. Baselines. Deltas. Over this long cold season, I've established a firm template of coziness. Removing .002 PSI causes a noticeable negative delta in coziness.
This seems to behave like a real 'compound sense', similar to income security or auditory satisfaction.
If a quantity or quality is a real physiological sense, it must show adaptation to a template and delicate differential sensitivity to deltas from the template. Okay, got that.
It also needs to have opposite endpoints, preferably with different connotations like light/dark, hot/cold, rich/poor. Not sure about that. Does coziness have endpoints? A picture in the news today helped me to say Yes.
Here's perfect negative coziness, the exact opposite of coziness:
Stuck on a narrow hard surface with no protection or cover anywhere; painful falls on two sides; noisy scary deadly monsters ROARING past constantly. Perfect negative cozy.
And high positive coziness looks something like this:
Coziness basically measures the existence and quality of a pouch. Surrounded on most sides by familiar things and familiar smells, weight on top, head or senses protruding.
Do plants know coziness? Of course. Roots covered with blanket of soil, stem protruding into the world.
Simple invertebrates are all about coziness. Corals and bryozoa: A hole in the ocean floor, proboscis or tentacles protruding. Crustacea and mollusks: a shell or carapace shielding most sides. Vertebrates have lost the tube or shell, so we have to seek part-time cozy. Most of us make our own cozy in one way or another. Nests, caves, holes in trees, walled cities, houses, beds with blankets.
Because cozy is a temporary thing that needs to be found or built, we need a sense that tells us when cozy is adequate, and gives us an alarm when cozy drops below default. So we have such a sense.

State-level news reports a "mysterious" cluster of anencephalic infants born in the Yakima area:

Since 2010, at least 30 babies — now 31 — have been diagnosed with anencephaly in a three-county area of central Washington state that includes Yakima and Sunnyside, where Robles grew up. That’s a rate of 8.7 per 10,000 births in the region, far higher than the national rate of 2.1 cases for 10,000 births. The problem has stumped Washington health officials, who say they can find no common link or exposure to explain the rise in the severe defects first noticed by a nurse at a rural hospital in 2012. They say many small clusters of birth defects turn out to be nothing more than coincidence.

Hmm. What do we know about the Yakima area? Lots of Mexicans. 30 seconds on Google yields:

There are racial/ethnic differences in risk for Neural Tube Deficits. In the United States, NTD prevalence has been reported to be highest among Hispanics, followed in descending order by non-Hispanic whites, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Asians.

Mystery solved. Of course this fact is an Unfact. It does not exist because humans are identical passive grains of sand. Race does not exist. Ethnicity does not exist. Therefore the authorities will continue to "explore" this "mystery", conscientiously avoiding all Unthoughts about Unfacts.
As always, Die-Versity = Genocide.

For the last 150 years the Teutonic countries of Northern Europe have been the heart of Satan. Nearly all evil ideologies originate there. Here's an interesting exception to the rule. A charity or NGO in the heart of EU Darkness seems to understands what God wants! The idea began in Amsterdam and is now continuing in Krautland.......

A German initiative will follow in the Dutch capital’s footsteps by instituting a plan for unemployed alcoholics and drug addicts to receive beer in exchange for cleaning streets. The measure by a local charity has already sparked some controversy. The so-called ‘Pick-up’ initiative is set to take effect mid-June ... by the organization Addict Support Essen.
The job will be cleaning the streets from three to six hours a day.
"The aim of the program is not to supply people with beer," the charity said.... "For the participants it is about a meaningful daily structure, feeling useful and learning a new way to behave."
Spokesman Barbel Marrziniak explained that a number of the participants in the program “simply need a bottle of beer to become fit for work. if we didn’t give it to them, they would not turn up in the first place.”

EXACTLY. It's a question of intrinsic vs extrinsic pleasure. For a serious drinker, anything associated with alcohol gains a pleasant flavor. Anything that takes him away from beer is unpleasant and simply won't happen. If we want people to re-learn the intrinsic pleasure of a completed task, we have to lead them into it via the extrinsic association of beer.

The usual theoretician-satans making the usual idiot points about our dire future. The usual Mensa Nazis worrying about "climate change", "climate change", "climate change", "climate change", "climate change", "climate change", and robot takeovers. They screech: Horrible things are happening!!!!! Why don't we care?????
For the Mensa Nazi it's all about IQ. Non-mensans (i.e. NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES) threaten to out-populate the Mensans, and robots will eventually out-IQ the Mensans.
Nature sees the problem differently.
The near-term threat to any species is local overpopulation. When your group outruns needed resources you have two choices. You can send Swarmers out to find new localities; or you can die (or ideally attrit) back to the supportable level.
These things happen without conscious decision. Whether you're a termite or a Mensan, your genes know how to make these choices.
The genes of most Western countries have chosen attrition. Birth rates drop below replacement, sometimes various forms of non-verbalized suicide (alcohol, drugs, car crashes, homosexual coupling) speed up the process.
But: How do we know that we're overrunning our resources? We have plenty of food, so personal hunger isn't the signal. I suspect there are two forces involved.
(1) Work is interchangeable with food. God, or Nature, or millenia of hard-earned experimental data, told Adam to work for his food, and told employers to be sure Adam was paid for his work. When Adam is deprived of work, or when Eve senses that Adam's work is insecure, attrition takes over. When steel mills close, when the socialist system collapses, when employers decide to can salmon with ledgers instead of workers, birth rates drop and alcohol and suicide take over.
(2) Nature knows the difference between adaptability and specialization. Western countries have become overspecialized. After a lifetime of office work, it doesn't matter if we're willing to pick apples. We can't do it fast enough to satisfy the overspecialized employer. Things are entirely different in Africa, where everyone knows how to improvise, and where improvisation is legally allowed and sufficiently profitable.
Specialized people stop reproducing. Their genes know that they've reached a dead end.
Adaptable people breed abundantly. Their genes know that they can swarm if necessary and improvise a living in new places.
And there's the answer to the Mensa Nazi question. We don't need to care about your dire scenarios. Our genes care about the real problem, and our genes are solving the real problem.
Or putting it another way, the narrow specialized Mensa Nazis see the adaptable people as the problem. Nature sees the adaptable people as the solution.
= = = = =
Update 5/28: A Brit academic named Jones makes the same overall point from a different angle, adding something that I SHOULD have connected here ... because I've talked about it often in a different context. Those adaptable people swarming from Africa are not only carrying a superior form of intelligence. They're carrying a stricter morality and a serious religious belief into the depopulated deracinated desexed lands of Satan. As Christianity decays into Gaian idolatry and Die-Verse insanity, it leaves a vast empty space in the souls of Westerners. Africans and Asians bringing strict Christianity and strict Islam are re-filling our souls.
Nature knows EXACTLY what she's doing.

Continuing the Switchover theme.
Cold War 2 is reversed from Cold War 1 in terms of governmental behavior, but not in terms of the people on both sides.
Before 1989, most Americans were some type of Christian. Protestant, Roman, Generic. Before 1989, most Russians were Eastern Orthodox Christians.
After 1989, the people are the same, but the church organizations are changing, which causes people to move in or out of organizations.
In America the organized 'established' churches have been accelerating toward Satan, while the disorganized evangelicals have remained Christian. The people have responded by moving out of the Satan-trending churches and into the continuous-Christian denominations.
In Russia the organized 'established' church is moving AWAY from its corrupt connection to Sovietism, so the people are moving back into the church. There aren't a lot of disorganized evangelicals, so that part of the parallel doesn't apply.
= = = = =
In both phases of the Cold War, the two sides have sent out propaganda to the rest of the world.
In CW 1 before 1989, Russia's government sent out a Marxist Soviet message, which didn't represent the feelings of the Russian people. America's government sent out a generic Western message, basically Christian in culture if not ideology. This did represent the American people.
= = = = =
In CW 2 after 1989, Russia's government is sending out a culturally Christian message, agreeing with the major teachings of both Christians and Muslims. This represents the feelings of the Russian people in a general way. America's government is sending out a Gramscian Soviet message, which doesn't represent the feelings of the American people.
I couldn't think of an appropriate icon for Gramsci, so I used the good old hammer-n-sickle. But it's really not the same thing.
The Marxist-Soviet message starts with the common Abrahamic goals of helping the poor and suppressing the rich; then accomplishes those goals by brute force.
The Gramscian-Soviet message runs counter to all Christian and Muslim goals. Crime is good; families are bad; charity is wrong; facts are EVIL; sexual deviance is good; paying taxes is stupid; robber barons are exemplary saints. Grab everything Moses and Jesus and Mohammed were trying to teach, toss it in the trash and do the exact opposite.

Extremely local news, happened within walking distance of my place, though it's not a block I normally walk to.
These folks thought they were barbecuing with charcoal but ended up barbecuing with gas! Hank wins!

Engine 13 from Wellesley and Jefferson arrived first on scene and reported heavy flames shooting 15 feet out of the ground with the home exposed approximately 15 feet from the fire. The fire was allowed to burn until AVISTA arrived and remotely shut down the residential gas leak. The home was completely protected with no structural damage from the natural gas fed fire.
The occupants of the home reported that there had been a birthday party with 15 friends enjoying a backyard camp fire. Fortunately most of the friends were dispersing when the fire melted and breached the plastic natural gas line that serviced the home. This resulted in the reported initial gas explosion and the intense gas fed fire.

Natural gas was piped into this part of town rather recently, so the PLASTIC pipes went under a lot of existing structures including firepits. Apparently the contractors didn't anticipate that a FIRE might be built in a FIREPIT, which would radiate enough heat into the shallow PLASTIC pipe to melt it.
Did you know natural gas was piped through PLASTIC? I didn't. The aboveground fixtures are all cast iron, so I ass-u-me-d the underground part was also iron.

Polistra and friends join Russia in celebrating V-Day!
Reducing WW2 down to the least common denominator, leaving out lots of important complications:
(1) Krauts and Japs had been viciously conquering huge sections of the world since 1905.
(2) In 1940 the rest of the world got tired of this and decided to stop it.
(3) Russia defeated the Krauts.
(4) America defeated the Japs.
Yes, Britain and America played a large part against the Krauts; and Australia and China played a large part against the Japs.
But without those helpers, the game still would have been Russia 1 / Krauts 0, and America 1 / Japs 0.
On May 9 Russia celebrates its victory over the Krauts, and mourns the huge loss of life and property that went into the victory.
On August 8 America SHOULD celebrate its victory over the Japs. Nope. That's not what we do. Instead, we CASTIGATE AND FLAGELLATE OURSELVES for being the monstrous evil nuclear bully who coldly and premeditatedly and unprovokedly attacked those peaceful Zen-like innocent fragile endangered vulnerable little Japanese flowers.
Russia is crude but fully sane. America is fully wacked out.

The usual super-rich fags and super-rich dykes and other types of super-rich super-Satans are protesting in front of a hotel owned by the super-rich Sultan of Brunei. They are supposedly protesting the fact that Brunei has adopted sharia.
Hmm. What are those little rectangular things in the hands of all the super-rich fags and dykes? Yes, boys and girls. Those little rectangles are smartphones. And where are those smartphones made? Yes, kiddies. They are made in China by slaves.
And what is China's official policy toward homosexuality?

Stamped with the red star of the state, the response came: Homosexuality was “against spiritual civilization construction” and “in violation of morals,” the Hunan Province Civil Affairs Department said, in a rare demonstration of an official position on homosexuality from a branch of the Chinese state, which usually adopts a “don’t tell and we won’t ask” attitude.

Well then. You are attempting to close down a fancy hotel. What do we know in general about the employees of fancy hotels? Yes, boys and girls. Many of those employees are your kind of people, though they are very far from super-rich. They are lower-middle-class homosexuals who have to work hard for a living, who have to listen to the bitching of super-rich hotel guests, who have to absorb the raw contempt of super-rich hotel guests, who have to smile and say "Yes sir!" to all of your bizarre requirements. And you are depriving them of a job.
In the process of starving the non-rich members of your own tribe, you are giving profit to the Chinese slave plantation, which has the same policy that you claim to be protesting.
Will the protest hurt the Sultan of Brunei? Nope. One hotel is a rounding error in his pocket-lint.
I guess it all makes sense in your "minds".

Abu Hamza, the radical Islamic preacher notorious for his hate-filled sermons, was in reality working secretly with British intelligence "to keep the streets of London safe" by "cooling hotheads", his lawyer claimed in a US court.
Holding up what he said were reports from Scotland Yard, Joshua Dratel described the cleric as an "intermediary" who cooperated with MI5 and the police to try to end foreign hostage-takings and defuse tensions with the Muslim community in Britain.
The extraordinary admission will fuel conspiracy theories that he was allowed to preach hatred without arrest for so long in the UK because he was working with the security authorities.

"Will fuel conspiracy theories" is a bizarre statement. This admission has actually verified those conspiracy theories, which means they are no longer theories. (Semantic note: We're not talking about the strict scientific meaning of theory here. Strictly speaking we're talking about hypotheses or narratives, but I'll continue to use theory because it's familiar in this context.)
Let's peel the onion.
Start with the most basic question. Is al-Qaeda a real radical movement, or is it a CIA-designed sting?
We know for a fact that al-Qaeda began as a CIA-designed operation to keep Russia busy in Afghanistan. Not a secret, not a theory. Open fact.
After the beginning, the facts are less obvious. We have plenty of separated data points showing CIA and FBI using radical Muslim propaganda to stir up stings. Most of the arrests since 1993 have been stings, young discontented Muslims who were not doing anything illegal until FBI gave them a fully-rounded and tempting scenario to work on. This created the overall impression of a large and well-financed radical group, when in fact most of the financing was done by FBI.
And of course we have current news from Syria, where we are arming and supporting al-Qaeda to fight against Assad. Just like we did before, just like we've been doing all along.
Most of the available data indicates an organization that is mostly a CIA tool. Some parts of al-Qaeda in some countries appear to be operating independently, but they have to make connections to the CIA-owned parts, which means they aren't truly independent. CIA can monitor and influence them indirectly.
So. Movement or sting? Given the limits of available knowledge, which is more like a fact and which is more like a speculative hypothesis?
Sting is more like a fact, supported by most available data. Independent operation is a hypothesis supported by very little data.
At this point in history, all major "conspiracy theories" that don't depend on Martians or Venusians have been shown to be factual in a basic sense, leaving details aside. Some were always true, others have turned from false to true recently.
The professional conspiracists, just like the professional theorists who call themselves "scientists", enjoy adding multiple layers of epicycles. They toss in innumerable organizations and names and secret thingamabobs that don't need to be there. Some of those professional theorists are being pushed by FBI AP's to make their theories more outrageous, some just enjoy complexity without being pushed. But after you Ockhamize the frills and filigrees, the basic points are true.
The last "theory" to click into place was the common schizy notion that "my mind is being monitored by the Authorities." Schizies have believed this for centuries, with embroidered details corresponding to the technology of the times. Until 20 years ago this idea was purely imaginary. Purely crazy. Now it's true. See Snowden.

You rarely hear REAL bass voices today. Some bass-like voices (eg Henry Kissinger) are actually glottal fry or 'chopper' notes, without a bass resonance.
One nice exception is radio reporter James Shimanyula, often heard on Channel Africa, a service of RSA. True bass, with the same range and resonance as the pedal register on a big church organ.
I can't find any specific clips of Shimanyula online, but if you listen to the Channel Africa podcasts you'll catch him quickly. No chance of missing his segments: your walls and floors and windows will let you know.

Heard on news: "Parts of Oklahoma are in a worse drought than the Dust Bowl."
This is nearly** always nonsense, but it pays to check.
So: It's NCDC Time, boys and girls!
Here's the official NOAA record for Precipitation, on a 12-month basis up to March of each year. Thus the most recent dot is April 2013 through March 2014. This is the best way of catching the latest data. The "annual" data would have only a partial average of the most recent year.
Top square is the whole state, then the 9 NCDC regions in sequence.
Well? See any record-breakers? Nope. The previous year, 2012-2013, was dry in most parts but nowhere near earlier droughts. The most recent 12-month period shows a definite recovery. It's close to average.
As Polistra has noted before, the 30's were not dramatically dry in Okla. The Dust Bowl was a result of bad farming practices in the 10's and 20's, brought to fruition by a moderate drought. Okla's longest drought on these charts was the 50's, but it didn't create a second Dust Bowl because FDR and Bob Kerr had built lots of dams and ponds to keep things wetter, and because farmers had learned better methods.
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**Footnote on Nearly always. The media somehow managed to get one thing right. California's drought this year is off the charts in all parts of Calif. But it's not a trend so far; it's a sudden extreme drop after no particular pattern in the previous few years. If you want to blame it on Evil KKKarbon, you'll have to impute a remarkable degree of Maxwell's Demon intelligence to the actions of a simple atom. Evil KKKarbon plotting in his Evil Overlord Lair: "Ha ha ha! I've been lulling them into inaction! I'll shock them with One Bad Year that's worse than any other year, then I'll hold them hostage for a ransom of One Million Dollars! Ha ha ha!"

Conjunction of two news items led to an interesting thought. Interesting to me anyway.
(1) Two hundred crimate "scientists" join Idiot Obama in shouting EVEN LOUDER about their URGENT NEED for MORE GRANT MONEY. They express this URGENT NEED by repeating the same criminal fraudulent murderous genocidal anti-science ratshit they've been shouting for exactly 40 years now, ever since the CIA and Comrade Margaret Mead conspired to create the scam.
(2) Medical authorities, after shouting for several years that taking one aspirin per day was the best thing you could do to prevent heart attacks, now decide that the advice wasn't so good after all.
We have one group of "scientists" who shout the same brazenly obvious lies for 40 years. Never changing, always taking the current situation as "proof" of the lies. It's getting warmer = "proof". It's getting colder = "proof". It's getting wetter = "proof". It's getting dryer = "proof". It's getting warmer in some places and cooler in other places = "proof". More storms = "proof". Less storms = "proof".
And we have another group of "scientists" who have changed their opinion based on changing collections of data.
Which group is the real "scientists"? Dead easy. The ones who change their opinions when the weight of data changes. That's the exact meaning of science.... or more precisely it's the behavior of all living things. Altering behavior to match perceived reality is what life does. Holding the same opinion regardless of data is the exact meaning of pseudoscience... or more precisely it's the behavior of non-living things like lumps of coal.
Here's the interesting thought.
Which group does the public believe? Unfortunately we tend to believe authorities who seem steady in their preaching. When real scientists alter conclusions based on data, we quite naturally say "Hey assholes! We were following your advice before. Now you say the exact opposite. We can't believe you any more. We're outta here."
The fake genocidal crimate "scientists" understand this better than the real life-saving medical scientists. If you want to be obeyed, you need to be steady.
There must be a solution to this, but I don't know what it is. Well, actually I do, but I'd be shot if I said it.

Pretty decent** thunderstorm a couple hours ago. Just now the KXLY weatherblond mentioned the storm, described it accurately enough, then said "And it's raining right now at the Spokane airport."
No it isn't, weatherblond. This tells me that you don't know how to use your info sources. The Weather Bureau's local observations are made once an hour unless something impels them to take more frequent readings. This means the indication is usually at least a half-hour behind. Also, the airport has an odd habit of showing -RA or DZ when absolutely everything is dry. Something in their instrumentation often senses rain when it's not really there.
How do I know it isn't there right now? Because I can see where the clouds are. They've moved off to the east, and the sky is clear in the direction of the airport. But mostly because Weather.com radar says so.
And I know from years of watching that Weather.com radar is NEVER wrong. Where it shows rain, it's raining. Where it shows no rain, it's not raining. This is accurate down to a few blocks, and correct EVERY TIME.
Know your instruments. Know your baselines. You may be a meteorologist, blondie, but you're not a metrologist.
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** Footnote: Spokane residents are tough about snow, but we're wussies about t-storms. If this "pretty decent thunderstorm" had happened in Oklahoma, I would have said "Hmm. Looked a bit cloudy for a while there, but nothing came of it. Thanks, weather gods!"

Just noticed something. BBC and NPR both steadfastly and famously refused to call al-Qaeda's soldiers terrorists when those soldiers were attacking New York or London. They were 'extremists' or 'militants'.
Now BBC and NPR are easily using the term terrorists to describe the pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. Ukraine's dubious government calls them terrorists, so we do the same. None of the usual indirection like "so-called terrorists" or "which they call terrorists". Just terrorists.
From a religious viewpoint it's strangely inconsistent. BBC and NPR are totally on Satan's side. Anti-god, anti-civilization, pro-abort, pro-fag, pro-euthanasia. Though some Islamic factions are fighting against Russia for ethnic reasons, the basic moral codes of Muslims and Russians are aligned with God's side on these particular issues. Thus there's no religious reason to distinguish between Muslims and Russians.
A more likely explanation is simple stupid team-based partisanship. Bush was fighting against al-Qaeda. Obama is fighting against Russia. In the alien "minds" of NPR/BBC, Bush is Public Enemy #1, so we must say the opposite of anything he says. Obama is Our Lord And Savior, so we must say exactly the same thing he says.
The American commercial networks are using more neutral terminology like "pro-Russian fighters." Apparently they learned something from the earlier kerfuffle about al-Qaeda extremists. Good for them.

I stopped subscribing to the Satan-Review, partly because it's 100% Satan, but mainly because it doesn't tell me anything I need to know. The latter problem is true of most newspapers and TV and radio sources even when they're only 99.99999% Satan. (Minimum permissible proportion.) It was true 50 years ago before Satan took over those sources.
Newspapers have always focused on the doings of the High And Mighty. In modern times the High And Mighty are pure Satan, but that's not the important variable.
Satan or not, I don't give a flying fuck about the High And Mighty. Their political squawkings and social affairs have zero effect on the ordinary citizen.
Here's what I need to know on a daily basis:
(1) When will the rain/snow hit, and when will the rain/snow stop?
(2) What caused the power outage?
(3) Where were those sirens going?
(4) Where is the nearest burglary or other serious crime?
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I can get the rain/snow info online from Weather.com radar.
I can get the outage info from Avista's excellent outage maps.
Until recently there was no practical way to acquire the siren and crime info. Now there is! The Spokane News facebook page selects the more serious items from police and fire data, leaving out medical calls and 'welfare checks' and so on. Contributors who live near a problem, or who were involved in an accident, often add useful info beyond the police-blotter basics. Exactly what I need to know! The page seems to be run by volunteers, so I hope it can keep going.

Haven't done a Self-explanatory sentence in a long time. Here's a quickie from the Spokane police blotter:
Deputies responding to a disturbance at Club Impulse inside Northern Quest Casino, are requesting assistance ASAP. Many Deputies responding.
Hmm. You're gambling in the indian casino, and you're in something called Club Impulse. What could possibly go wrong?

Peter van Buren is trying to do a modern echo of Steinbeck's picture of America. Seems to be an accurate set of observations.
Steinbeck often gets credit for being a socialist, but he wasn't. The movie version of Grapes is pure Sovietism, going considerably beyond the book. In other books Steinbeck is firmly in favor of real capitalism and firmly opposed to financialism. He's a Populist.
I've often used his line about canning salmon with ledgers instead of workers. But I hadn't really analyzed the other side of Cannery Row. Rather odd, since I've read the book dozens of times, and more or less based my life on the Ricketts model.
In fact Cannery Row is an economics text. Every page tells in microscopic detail how people make a living, how they save for the future or fail to save, how and why they spend. Doc Ricketts had found a way to use specialized knowledge plus occasional hard work to make a decent frugal income. (I followed his** model and found that it works.) Mack and the boys were content with much less, and survived on occasional hard work plus no specialized knowledge. Lee Chong the grocer (We go see flog) is closer to conventional business, and Fauna the madam is the most conventional of all. She knows how to blackmail politicians to get what she wants, and she is an expert in managing and motivating employees and customers.
Each character demonstrates a different way of making an honest living, though all of them are outside the corporate mainstream. Corporations form a constant shadow and threat to these honest workmen, always ready to yank out the foundation of a real business.
The plot (if you can call it that!) is a fable about banksterism. Mack is always hatching bubbles and con-games and schemes to make The Big Kill. Mack has some bankster qualities: he knows the difference between a trading flog and an eating flog. His schemes fail because he isn't ruthless enough to starve thousands of people and destroy entire countries. Mack never realizes that you must have Chosen-style Ethics if you want to gain a Chosen-style Fortune.
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**Footnote: I found out later that the real Ed Ricketts was nowhere near as frugal as the character of Doc. The real Ed had to work much harder because he had unwisely chosen to support two complete households in a sort of informal polygamy. Two wives, lots of kids. I suspect the Doc character resembled the actual Steinbeck more than the actual Ricketts; nevertheless, the system worked for me.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.